Report -NGTE Pyestock â€“ September 2010

28DL Full Member

First of all, a brief bit of history, although I am sure youâ€™ve all read it all before:

â€œThe National Gas Turbine Establishment (NGTE Pyestock) in Fleet, part of the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), UK was the prime site in the UK for design and development of gas turbine and jet engines. It was created by merging the design teams of Frank Whittle's Power Jets and the RAE turbine development team run by Hayne Constant. NGTE spent most of its lifetime as a major testing and development center, both for experimental developments as well as supporting the major commercial engine companies.

For over 50 years Pyestock was at the forefront of gas turbine development and was almost certainly the largest site of its kind in the world. V Bomber, Harrier and Tornado engines were all rigorously tested on site, the power of the air house allowed Concorde's engines to be tested at 2,000 mph, every single gas turbine installed in the Royal Navy were checked here, captured Soviet engines were discretely examined - and all this on terra firma, without a single plane taking off.

NGTE Pyestock closed down in 2000. The Pyestock campus is now in the state of being decommissioned pending the building of a large business/industrial park.â€

Kent-Urbex and I had talked about visiting Pyestock for the best part of a year, but kept trying to go with someone who had visited before, as we had heard it wasnâ€™t the easiest explore, and we wanted to see as much of it as we could. Plans kept falling through, and eventually we just decided to bite the bullet and go for it ourselves.

I was glad we did, as the explore went as well as I could have hoped for. It really is an unbelievable place, possibly my favourite ever, definitely right up there. The scale of everything is absolutely huge, and itâ€™s not in particularly bad nick for being closed for a decade. We heard security driving about, but we had no real scares at all.

We managed to see the Air House, Number 10 Exhauster, Cell 3 West, Cell 4 and a few small buildings. I was a bit disappointed that we didnâ€™t see Cell 3, but thatâ€™s a pretty good excuse to go back. Cell 4 was definitely the highlight, it reminded me of the Japanese anime â€˜Akiraâ€™ a bit with all the wires everywhere and an almost organic feel.